Renewable Energy
Do you know where the energy comes from to run your car or turn on the heat and lights in your home? We use many different sources of energy every day. And some of them will last as long as our sun continues to shine – billions of years! But other sources of energy take millions of years to form, and we are using them up so fast that they will someday run out.
Fossil fuels – such as oil, coal and natural gas – are the sources of energy that we will eventually run out of. They are non-renewable because they take so very long to form. Today, they are the major source of our electricity and the gasoline we use to run our cars.
Renewable energy sources – such as solar power and wind power – are the sources we won’t run out of! These are the types of energy we are going to look at in this Greentimes JR. We hope you enjoy learning about these special sources of energy.
-- Araña Pequeña
Renewable Energy: What and Why
By Sokol Sota
Renewable energy is any natural source of energy that does not
run out. Renewable energy comes from many things in nature such as the sun, wind,
running water, and hot magma and steam deep inside Earth.
Solar energy can be used to provide electricity in homes or buildings. Solar energy can also be used directly to provide heat. We can convert the kinetic (moving) power of the wind into electricity too. And water energy (hydropower) is another common method for obtaining energy. Last but not least another renewable source used today is called geothermal energy. Geothermal energy is heat and steam captured from inside the Earth.
Renewable energy sources are wonderful options because they are limitless. We won’t run out of them as we will eventually run out of the fossil fuels (such as coal, oil and natural gas) that we currently depend upon. Also, another great benefit of using renewable energy is that many of these sources do not pollute our air and water the way that burning fossil fuels do. You will probably hear more and more about sources of renewable energy in the days and months to come!
Hot Energy!
By Rashida Registe
What is solar power? It is energy we get from our sun!
Did you know that solar power is a renewable source of energy? Since the
sun will keep shining for billions of years to come, we will not run out of solar energy
for a long, long time.
People have been using solar power for thousands of years. Ancient Greeks used the sun to heat their homes. Since they knew that the position of the sun changed with the seasons, they were able to construct their buildings so that the sun directly hit them in the winter, but not in the summer when they wanted to stay cool. Some homes are still heated this way. This technique is called passive solar heating. Another example of passive solar heating is when sunlight shines on a pool and warms the water.
How else do we use solar power? Solar cells collect energy from sunlight and convert it into electricity. An example of this is a calculator that does not have a battery, but runs instead off of energy from sunlight. But we can also put lots of solar cells together into big panels that collect enough energy to provide homes and businesses with electricity.
I hope you’ve learned a lot about how we use energy from the sun!
Solar Power Fun Facts: Every 20 days the planet Earth receives as much energy from sunlight as there is estimated to be in all the coal, oil and natural gas combined!
Wind Energy
By Wilhemina Agbemakplido and Janice Tsang
Do you remember the last time you felt the wind or a light breeze?
When you feel moving air you are being touched by wind energy!
And when you see a fluttering sail on a boat, the sail is being used to harness
wind energy. The earliest sails, which were made of woven mats, were tied up on
the mast of a boat to push the boat forward. This energy helped move the boat
through the water and replaced the energy and effort usually used by people when they
row a boat. Some sports also use the same sail method, such as hang gliding.
In the olden days, wind was also used to power windmills that ground corn and pumped water. Nowadays wind energy is used by modern windmills, called turbines, to produce electricity. For many countries in the world, especially in places closer to the coasts of oceans, like Denmark, wind power is a valuable and useful resource.
Wind energy is most useful in places where there is a lot of wind. Without a decent amount of wind, wind power is not a good energy option. Some places that we use wind power here in the United States are along the East Coast, the Appalachian Mountains, the Great Plains and the Pacific Northwest. Here in Massachusetts there is a big wind farm that may be put on the very windy Cape Cod!
